Getting most of your business: Understanding the importance of Business Intelligence and Data Analysis

Currently two problems are plaguing the businesses, their data analytics and business intelligence and all the industries are affected by them.

Problem 1:
Organizations are not doing any real data analysis and instead are relying on some Spaghetti method of business and reasons can be many:
1. They may not have enough time.
2. They may not have enough money.
3. They don’t realize that they need detailed analysis to stay in the business and to make the profit.

Problem 2:
Organizations are gathering all the data and bits without even realizing what they all means and nor they have an idea of how to put this all together to tell the whole story.

Without any proper Business Intelligence organizations whether small or large are cursed to waste money and time like they are nothing on sales, marketing, product development and R&D because in reality they don’t where to put the effort to get the optimum results.

With all the advance technology out there and all the talented consultants who can make sense of your data there is no excuse for the company to not know who their audience is, what is the best way to reach them, what they are buying and what they will need in future.

Let’s take a look at four steps which every organization must take in order to make sense of the business intelligence.

Step 1: What data you are collecting and where it is coming from?
Data can come from many sources such as:
1. Advertising
2. Email
3. Social Media
4. CRM
5. Web analytics
6. Surveys
If you leave any one of them or throw too much weight on any single source you are bound to throw your conclusions in other direction.

So when you are picking the data from different sources and deciding which source contributed how much ask yourself some questions:
1. Where is the bulk of my audience hailing from?
2. Which source is capable of giving most accurate analysis of my audience?
3. Is there any source from where people are coming and I am not aware yet?
After this you need to link the data directly to what you do by monitoring the satisfaction rate of the clients. So, in the nut shell your task is to figure out what you are looking for, what data you have and what are your sources.

Step 2: Find the missing pieces
Are there some clients for which you cannot account for how they find you? Are there some questions related to your business you can’t answer? For example, why you are constantly out of medium sized t-shirts? If there are questions like these then there is data missing and you need to find where it is hiding and how can you collect?

Step 3:Integration
The real work starts now because you have collected the data from different sources and now you are ready to see hoe data integration works.
Integration does not only mean to put all the data together but it means to put the data together in such a way that it makes sense and you can continue to track the same. Your in-house BI analytics department can put together a dashboard that can integrate the data for you.

Step 4: What does metrics means?
This step is the moment that you have been waiting for and now you can find the answers to your most pressing business and operational questions. The answer can be straight or you may have to do some additional analysis to reach to a certain conclusion.

Step 4 is just the beginning in a real sense and you need to constantly analyze and monitor the data in order to achieve your goals.